Daily Archives: December 1, 2017

1st December 2017 – Astro-Weather: You can still catch Saturn & Mercury deep in the bright afterglow of sunset.

The waxing gibbous Moon shines in the east this evening. Look upper right of Bella Luna for the two brightest stars of Aries, left of Her for the little Pleiades cluster, & below the Pleiades for orange Aldebaran.

1834 – Slavery is abolished in the Cape Colony in accordance with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.

1862 – In his State of the Union Address President Abraham Lincoln reaffirms the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation.

1865 – Shaw University, the first historically black university in the southern United States, is founded in Raleigh, North Carolina.

1913 – The Buenos Aires Metro, the first underground railway system in the Southern Hemisphere and in Latin America, begins operation.

1913 – Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.

1919 – Lady Astor becomes the first female Member of Parliament to take her seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom

1947 – Deathday of Aleister Crowley, an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, & mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.

1952 – The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery.

1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man & is arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city’s bus boycott.

1958 – The Our Lady of the Angels School fire in Chicago kills 192 children & 23 nuns

1984 – NASA conducts the Controlled Impact Demonstration, where an airliner is deliberately crashed in order to test technologies & gather data to ‘help improve survivability of crashes’.

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Sonya Treever

POD (Poem Of the day)

~Doves nest in my hair & spit fire from my head…My heart beats like a bee tongue among the withered roses As the Avatar winds of Sophia speak Wisdom into our bones…
~hag

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When the Sun Moves Northward: Being a Treatise on the Six Sacred Months ~Mabel Collins (edited with revised pronouns by hag)

In honor of the official signing of the lease with Elderberries Three-Fold Cafe in Chicago!

December: The Birth Month

December 1st: The Ceremony of Desire of Birth

Karen Venter

The aspirant is aware that the human being is a part of Nature, & that the mysteries are revealed to us when we enter into the secret & sacred life of the heavens & the earth. For us the yearly season of material birth is preceded by the spiritual state of desire of birth. The ancients knew, what we must remember, that the sun must will to die, or lose his fertilizing energy, in the autumn & early winter, so that all Nature can begin life anew; & the month of December is devoted to the preparation for this fresh life.

The sun being is depicted at that period of the year as a little child. Humanity’s spiritual being is indissolubly associated with this little child, this light-bringer; & as the disciple attains consciousness they become aware of the mystic recurrence of that miracle which is described in the religions as birth, death, & resurrection. As they move up the steps of consciousness, they learn that the spiritual light-bearer must endure the martyrdom of crucifixion in time & space, & must descend into the tomb of matter. And as the Great Ones in their bright succession endure this, so must their followers.

Timothy Michael Foley

The yearly initiations begin with that desire of rebirth into matter which brings the human spirit into the condition of suffering under the rule of the pairs of opposites; heat & cold, pleasure & pain, love & hate, male & female – these opposing conditions assail us continually. It was the work of the Christ to show the meaning of the Cross, & to teach the great lesson of sacrifice which means that none shall seek Freedom till all are saved. He promised to remain with us always, renouncing His Nirvana until the end of the world, & dwelling with His beloved children – the publican & the sinner – in the mysterious inner places of consciousness.

Annael A. Pavlova

And those who follow Him must do likewise, & must enter into the state of the desire of birth each year with a yearly increase of the will to help the world. Thus the desire changes its character by degrees, & becomes selfless instead of selfish. The soul of the human being & the soul of the world, the soul of Nature & of sub-Nature, all pass alike through the birth-throes.

Salvador Dali

In December, the birth month, there are seven great & vital Ceremonies, filling the whole month with their observances. The first is the Desire of Birth, the commencement of the mystic story. It is so remote from human & material life that it is impossible to describe it in human language. It is witnessed consciously only by the spiritual being before its descent into matter. The disciple who seeks to take part in it while living in the body, must endeavour to recall to their psychic memory the litany which they heard chanted in the spiritual sphere from which they came when they sought the experience of human life.

Roku Sasaki

The Ceremony of the Desire of Birth lasts for four days & nights, beginning on 1st of December. During this time it is necessary for the disciple to contemplate all that is implied in its litany. At each midnight, & at the hour of dawn, we should meditate upon the words of the litany, endeavouring to obtain understanding in respect to them. They are very difficult & obscure, so much so as to seem meaningless in material life if tested only by the light of the intellect. But the disciple who desires to become a conscious part of the Divine whole, must enter into the life of the world at this sacred season, & apprehend from year to year more & more of the mystery of the divine life within our self, in union with the material.

LITANY for the Ceremony of the Desire of Birth:

I desire birth.

I am ready to be burned and consumed; for that is what birth is.

I am ready to be naked and unprotected, and to suffer from my nakedness; for that is what life is.

I am ready to make the pilgrimage through matter in darkness and in fire, so that the circle of the uncreated shall become one with the circle of the created.

James Christensen

The ordeal of fire which comes upon the soul immediately that the desire for birth is experienced, & continues while the human being remains human, is the burning out & consuming of all alloy in the nature. When this is accomplished, the ego can effect the miracle of resurrection & rebirth into a higher state, & can begin to form a regenerated shape which shall be worthy of immortality.

The instinct of the animal nature is to avoid suffering & to seek protection from it. But the Spirit of Humaity has sought birth in matter with the object of obtaining purification, & wishes, therefore, not only to enter the ordeal of fire but to enter it unprotected. Therefore does it utter these two stanzas of the litany which follow the expression of desire of birth.

Walter Crane

The mystic union is expressed in the last stanza; it is beyond the understanding of the human intellect. We can only dimly apprehend it by degrees as we follow the occult ceremonies, & obtain more & more illumination in respect to them. Autumn, winter, spring, & summer repeat themselves duly every year, because the Divine Spirit of Nature descends continually upon Nature, & passing through matter returns to itself. The drama is enacted afresh every year. The story of the pilgrimage of the spirit of humanity is contained within this yearly drama, & is the basis of the legends which form the groundwork of the great religions.

Kari Marie Olson

Desire, marriage, birth, these bring us hither: love, death, resurrection, these carry us hence; just as the green leaves come with every springtide, so does the inner meaning of the green leaves reveal itself to the disciple in perpetual recurrence.

The ancient Egyptians were the first to institute a sacred calendar, in which every day had its special religious ceremony. The Egyptian initiate, who gave fragments of the Birthday Litany & the Resurrection Litany from the ancient Ritual to the author of the Story of the Year, has now outlined the rites & vigils of the months between Christmas & Easter. The sacred months are those in which the sun moves northwards.

(Rudolf Steiner brought this work into the age of the Conscious Soul in relation to the modern human being, in his Calendar of the Soul, which begins at Easter)

The Story of Being Human: Fairy-Tales for adults – a Journey thru the Holy Nights

The Fairy-tale leads us to our true humanity, where great kingdoms preside within, filled with ancient forests, remote castles, giants, witches, lovers, dreams & visions of Star Beings & of the Earth Herself. Shepherded by Joen Dealande & a series of guest artists, we will use Drama, Eurythmy, Painting, Needle-Felting, & Sculpting, to live into the gesture of our Human karma & Destiny.

NYE Sunday December 31st (The 13th Hidden Holy Night) 8pm – 1am – Our annual Community NYE party with music by Jutta & the High Dukes, Lead Casting, Eurythmy, Crafting, Games & more TBA $20